Excerpt
In her essay for the Carr Center's latest publication, Making a Movement: The History and Future of Human Rights, Yanilda María González discusses one of the most pervasive racial justice challenges: continued police violence against racialized and impoverished communities.
Yanilda María González, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
"In recent years, concerted mobilization by civil society organizations and grassroots communities around the world has laid bare one of the most pervasive and enduring human rights and racial justice challenges in many diverse democracies: police violence against racialized and impoverished communities.
"A recent transnational workshop hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School highlighted civil society strategies against police violence and underscored the shared nature of the problem. Whether in Cali, Chicago, Caracas, Lagos, Paris, Santo Domingo, or São Paulo, workshop participants described rampant abuses and violence at the hands of police, concentrated against low-income Black youth in urban peripheries around the world.
"The problem of racialized police violence is far from new, but the work of activists from affected communities and civil society organizations has placed it at the top of the public agenda. The careful work of survivors, families, and advocates in meticulously documenting abuses and sharing personal narratives has been essential for educating the public and policymakers alike about the magnitude and scope of police violence, as well as laying bare the stark racial and class disparities at the core of the problem. In making their case, activists around the world have drawn on human rights language to call for justice and denounce their governments for failing to protect them from police violence. As one mother of a victim of police violence in Brazil declared in a recent public hearing in São Paulo, “we live in a nation that claims to defend a democratic rule of law, but they violate the most important human right, [the right] to life.”
"The careful work of survivors, families, and advocates in meticulously documenting abuses and sharing personal narratives has been essential for educating the public and policymakers alike about the magnitude and scope of police violence..."
"Human rights instruments and bodies have played an essential role in this work. Civil society activists and advocates the world over have used international human rights bodies to draw attention to racialized police violence as a grave human rights violation. Activists in Chicago mobilized an intergenerational coalition of community leaders to testify before the UN Committee Against Torture in 2014 to denounce that the Chicago Police Department’s “conduct constitutes torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment (CIDT) as defined by the Convention [Against Torture], and occurs at extraordinary rates, disproportionately against minorities, and with impunity.” More recently, Brazil’s Mothers of May—a collective of mothers of victims of police killings—and the human rights organization Conectas testified before the UN Human Rights Council to denounce a lethal police operation that resulted in nearly 30 deaths at the hands of São Paulo’s Military Police in August 2023.
"While international human rights bodies and treaties have been rightly criticized due to the difficulty of enforcement, they have nevertheless been an indispensable tool in the struggle against police violence. Despite well-known limitations, the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indeed provide 'a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations' that ordinary citizens can employ to denounce their governments for racist and unaccountable police violence." ■